The Skyline Artist
At 82, architect Frank Gehry is credited with bringing back the strut and sparkle of the New York skyline with 8 Spruce Street, a 76-storey skyscraper, the tallest residential building in New York. Covered in sculpted, muscular folds, the building has been commended for both elegance and originality. This is his first ever skyscraper but only the latest in a long line of astonishing Gehry buildings, including the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, the Dancing House in Prague and the Walt Disney concert hall in Los Angeles. He is the rare architect adored by both critics and the public. Based in Santa Monica, California, Gehry works with a tremendous team of architects and model makers to bring his surreal sketches to life. The resulting structures are imbued with the energy of Gehry’s original sketches and with the improbable nature of his study models. Gehry also devised the concept, ‘The Organisation of the Artist’. The term denotes the organisational set-up Gehry enforces when his designs are being built to avoid subordination of the design creator and is part of his approach to effective project management. Corporations Apple Inc and Pixar are both organised according to versions of this concept. In recent times, the Pritzker Architecture Prize winner has raised eyebrows for saying that the costs of making a green building are “enormous,” and that “they don’t pay back in your lifetime”.
